If one were attempting to mummify Occupy Wall Street by reducing it to a greatest hits list of accomplishments, the kinds of questions asked Tuesday by many mainstream news outlets would be a good start:

"What about the street presence? Isn't that Occupy's single greatest strength? Is there anything left if that's gone?"

With the May Day march down Broadway, protesters effectively put an end to any such efforts to Facebook-timeline the movement.

First, the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show. Four police officers I spoke with at about 8pm near Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway, estimated the crowd at 25,000, and Occupy Wall Street organizers put it variously at 10,000–15,000 and at 50,000. The office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Affairs at the NYPD explained on the morning of 2 May that the NYPD "does not give out crowd estimates. Ask the organizers." The New York Civil Liberties Union put the number at 30,000.

Second, it included too many factions for Occupy Wall Street to be considered homogeneous anymore. Among the groups chanting "We are the 99%" were the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, construction worker union LIUNA Local 78, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and the AFL-CIO.

The movement is proving not to be as instantly archivable as some may have wished. It is a complex organism. It is forming new alliances and severing old ones. Street protest is colorful and quantifiable, but it is by no means the movement's only avenue.

Occupy is a new form of protest comprised of ordinary living, strategically placed. It electrified us last fall when, in Liberty Square, we lived simply in the open, fed each other, made our own media and security, created new hand signaling for a start-over democracy.

We had tried to find a new kind of protest for decades – accused so often of recycling protest clichés, the rally and the march, the signs and shouts. Then we found it right in front of us, living life in ordinary terms on islands of public space, all in the shadows of the financial dark lords vacuum-wrapped in their reflective glass.

This proved transfixing theatre. The play had a long run. The police were flummoxed by the invasion of pup tents and pots of soup and crucially sincere discussions.

Finally, in the US, led by uniformed thugs in Oakland and New York City, the first amendment to the US constitution was amended to allow police violence. In a matter of weeks in November, coordinated by terror professionals in Washington, we were ousted from public space. The security state, often financed openly by big banks (in New York, JP Morgan Chase paid $4.6m) – finally figured out our magic. Now what?

Lots of revolutions hide in the camouflage of the population, although that is more identified with Cuba in the 1950s or South Africa in the 1980s or Syria now. Pre-Occupy, how many tens of thousands were there on New York streets? Tuesday, there was a huge May Day show of marching, but it was completely ignored by such papers as the New York Times and New York Daily News, resembling once again a traditional protest. But under sunshine, with so many families, it was an exhilarating hello within our culture. The number of cops and helicopters was almost breathtaking, and added to the reminder that we are a threat to the 1%.

Clearly, the future lies in again inventing a protest form. Our evolution makes the revolution. There are ways to open up the seams of society and once again emerge powerfully, communicating with the larger world in unstoppable ways.

Hannah Appel: 'May Day felt like a celebration of renewed possibilities'

May Day started with 99 pickets headed out into the Manhattan drizzle. In front of Citigroup's world headquarters, protesters chanted their critiques through the now-famous people's microphone: $10bn profit in 2010 alone, zero dollars federal taxes for five years running. Elsewhere, an Immigrant Worker Justice Tour led protesters from Wells Fargo to Chipotle, to the Capital Grille, setting up a picket at each to highlight the forms of workplace discrimination particular to immigrant workers. In each of the picket lines, one could see signs of Occupy Wall Street – puppets, the use of the people's microphone – side by side with community organizations (New York Communities for Change, the Immokalee Workers), and unions including the Teamsters Local 814 and the UFCW Local 1500.

In short, May Day 2012 indexed a time of surprising political possibility. Thinking back to the summer of 2011, the intractable political argument in the US was whether or not to raise the debt ceiling. But as Occupy Wall Street burst into downtown Manhattan's privately-owned public spaces, questions of inequality catapulted to the front pages, as did a renewed focus on the financial industry's role in an economic crisis that seemed to pass systemic risk to tax payers and systemic reward to the top.

May Day felt, in many ways, like a celebration of renewed possibilities: critiques of the foreclosure crisis, student debt, or investment banks' ongoing role in the European debt crisis were sharper; coalitions that would've been unimaginable only a few months ago – between immigrant workers and unions, for example – took their first public steps.

The drizzle cleared to sunshine, and a free university unfolded in Madison Square Park with people crowding around teach-ins and discussions. In one – "Weapons of Math Destruction" – a former hedge-fund quantitative analyst, now an organizer with Occupy Wall Street's Alternative Banking group, talked to a growing crowd about the abuse of mathematical modeling in the financial industry. Eventually a "guitarmy" of musicians swept those gathered in Madison Square Park into a march that stopped first to rally in Union Square, and then proceeded down Broadway, where else but to Wall Street, where the movement started nine months ago, and where May Day 2012 ended in an impromptu dance party and public assembly.

The measure of a genuine uprising, as distinct from a political campaign or mobilization, is the degree of its "newness", in the phrase of the New England Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. By that standard, the broad Occupy movement is a genuinely new force in the world, one which has unhinged "the predictable".

Tuesday, there were hundreds of spirited protests as Occupiers ended their winter. There were protests against Iraq a decade ago, but these are defined by their youthful leadership, courage, and geographic breadth. The tactics in some places deserves discussion. But instead of being critical spectators on the sideline, we all can demand that our leaders not mechanically defend the status quo with police and empty promises.

The Occupy movement, and kindred spirits from the Middle East to China, is driven by young people who feel unrepresented by the institutions, disenfranchised economically, and threatened by an environmental catastrophe.

The direct action movement of the early 1960s was similar in nature. Young black students, lacking the vote and facing a Jim Crow future, became Freedom Riders and occupied segregated lunch counters. Students who could not vote but could be drafted for Vietnam took up resistance. Our elders utterly failed in their duty to nurture the young. Mounting catastrophes were the result, until the Vietnam war was ended, Richard Nixon deposed, and democratic reforms conceded.

Now that we have an African-American president and normal relations with Vietnam, one wonders why the crises of the sixties really were necessary. Power seems to yield only stubbornly, always leaving a trickle of blood to warn against future defiance.

Will today's establishment yield or not? It appears that Merkel's stark vision of austerity is being rejected, that Labour is rising in the UK, that the Socialists may win in Paris. The popular tide is running against privatization and repression, as it has in the US since 2008, where the Tea Party is losing support.

But will new political leaders, benefiting from rage against the City of London and Wall Street, deliver anything of real value, such as a Robin Hood tax? And if not, then what?

This is the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the American New Left. Despite the great democratic reforms our generation did achieve, one mountain remained untouched. The 1962 statement noted that 1% of Americans controlled 80% of all corporate wealth, and that the disparity was changed since the 1920s, despite the Keynesian reforms of the New Deal.

If there is any chance at all that our elected governments can bring the unelected financial oligarchs to heel, it will take a new generation of Robin Hoods, burdened by debt from the modern Crusades, along with feminists and environmentalists (Maid Marions), and a radical spirituality (Friar Tuck). Or a new dark ages will descend.

Tom Hayden is a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society, and is the founder and director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center

May Day in New York City was beautiful. From the "99 pickets" protest in the morning targeting corporate headquarters in midtown, to the Bryant Park pop-up occupation, to the Free University in Madison Square Park where students and educators went on strike by holding their classes outside, to the joyous, fair-like atmosphere of Union Square and, finally, with the energetic march with tens of thousands of people, chanting, singing, dancing all the way to Wall Street, the city felt re-imagined and re-invigorated. The entire day was inspiring and powerful.

I had been anxious about the day for months, anxious that the multiple-hour-long planning meetings, the outreach strategies, the banner-making parties, the coalition meetings and the coordinating meetings would all be for nothing. Anxious that months and months of planning that went into May Day would have been spent in vain. Anxious that it would rain, that no one would come, that it would be a failure. And while it rained a little, the day was a huge success with tens of thousands of people on the streets standing and acting together.

These months of planning have changed the Occupy movement. Through alliance-building and working with unions, community groups, immigrant rights groups and the burgeoning student movement, Occupy has had to learn from the longer history of organizing and activism in New York. It has had to learn what it means to listen to groups and people from diverse places and with diverse experiences and to work with them. It has had to understand itself better through this listening, and it has had to convince other groups that it is a serious movement, not just some kids who camped in a park for a few months.

The success and beauty of Tuesday was a testament to how important these alliances and this work have been. But it was also a testament to the ways that we must understand, as we chanted on the streets, that all our grievances are connected. The lesson of May Day is that we are powerful when we do more than just say this, but when we enact it in our activism.

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, a founding member of the editorial collective In Front and Center

Rinku Sen: 'We can smile our way through the fights we pick, but pick them we must'

Someone asked me recently what was the best way to convince administrators to address racial inequities with systemic changes on her college campus. How can we convince the powers that be to change their ways? Embedded in that question was an abiding assumption that the people who already enjoy positional power must agree with an idea in order to implement it.

While many people running key institutions are doing their best to close racial, economic and gender gaps across the world, in my experience, there are many more whose chief concern is maintaining the status quo. If "convincing" such leaders to do the right thing only required presenting compelling evidence, then we could make all sorts of change simply by producing research reports and hosting conversations.

And that's why I love May Day. The protests tie us to a tradition of righteous collective action, and remind us that profound changes require actual fighting; that not everything can be achieved through consensus; and that the pathway to change is in building and channeling the power of the people who need the change. It's not about convincing the recalcitrant or the blind, nor about asking nicely. The project of progressive social change requires aggregating enough power to make a demand and have it stick.

The original May Day took place in the middle of a 50-year struggle to establish the eight-hour workday. The titans of industry resisted violently, not just because the new rule would cut into their profits, but also because it opened the door to regulation in general. Many of our current agenda items will require similar timelines because they will, in fact, reduce the money and power that elites have.

Today's elites aren't going to give up those assets any more easily than yesterday's. Racial, economic, and gender justice are all possible to achieve. An optimistic tone and solutions orientation take us a long way in recruiting allies. We can smile our way through the fights we pick, but pick them we must.

Rinku Sen is executive director and president of the Applied Research Center, and the publisher of Colorlines.com